Cover Charge

In spite of my prior advice regarding the creation of your own book covers, which I talked about ignoring in a previous post, I think the covers for The Drop came out looking pretty sharp. So, yesterday I had an idea of a cover for First Step. I thought, why not give it a shot? I gave detailed descriptions on what I imagined to the publisher for First and Next Time, so in this case why not take my prompts and see how it came out? Spoiler alert: it looked horrible. Seriously. It was like someone took a white piece of paper and ran it through a laser printer with my name and the title in nice, black print, with tiny image in the middle. It’s what I’d thought of, but the execution looked horrendous. This morning I had a completely different idea and used Grok to create a picture and then put that on a cover. It looked like a non-fiction book on nature. The ideas themselves aren’t bad. In fact, if I’d tried this exercise with the two aforementioned books, my output would’ve looked nothing like what the publisher created. Why am I telling you this? Because I need to tell myself again that the cover creation needs to be done by the professionals. Could I tinker with the idea and come up with something passable? Maybe. More likely, I’d end up with a cover that looks exactly like how it was made: by an amateur.